It’s no wonder why politics attracts so many people.... definitely there is an urge to do something for society, but in the process they do a lot for themselves!! Though the picture is same everywhere, but here would like to delve into the facts and figures from US.
Case in point is US Congressmen and Senators. When a Representative (name with-held) was first elected to Congress two decades ago, he was comfortably ensconced in the middle class. Mr. Representative, held $100,000 or so in savings accounts in the mid-1990s and had a retirement pension, but like many Americans, he also owed the banks nearly as much in loans.
Today, Mr. Representative, a miner’s son and a former high school teacher, is a member of a not-so-exclusive club: Capitol Hill millionaires. That group has grown in recent years to include nearly half of all members of Congress — 250 in all — and the wealth gap between lawmakers and their constituents appears to be growing quickly, even as Congress debates unemployment benefits, possible cuts in food stamps and a “millionaire’s tax.”
Mr. Representative buys a Powerball lottery ticket every weekend and says he does not consider himself rich. Indeed, within the halls of Congress, where the median net worth is $913,000 and climbing, he is not. He is a rank-and-file millionaire. But compared with the country at large, where the median net worth is $100,000 and has dropped significantly since 2004, he and most of his fellow lawmakers are true aristocrats. Just to give a sense of the scale of wealth I am talking about, its in millions of dollars. Congressmen need to disclose their wealth in broad range and many of them have disclosed it in range as wide as $150mn -$700 mn!!!
Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.
Politics has always been patronized by the wealthy. US Congress has never been a place for paupers either. From plantation owners in the pre-Civil War era to industrialists in the early 1900s to ex-Wall Street financiers and Internet executives today, it has long been populated with the rich, including scions of families like the Guggenheims, Hearsts, Kennedys and Rockefellers.
But rarely has the divide appeared so wide, or the public contrast so stark, between lawmakers and those they represent. When the times are good, the common man would largely not notice such differences in wealth. But with the current economic turmoil that has awaken the people, the difference are too stark to go unnoticed.
There is broad debate about just why the wealth gap appears to be growing. For starters, the prohibitive costs of political campaigning may discourage the less affluent from even considering a candidacy. Beyond that, loose ethics controls, shrewd stock picks, profitable land deals, favorable tax laws, inheritances and even marriages to wealthy spouses are all cited as possible explanations for the rising fortunes on Capitol Hill. But nevertheless the point remains that our politicians do get richer while they serve the poorer common man; something that cannot be explained by plain economics.
